“The Democrats ObamaCare Is Imploding” Trump Tweets Hours After Cutting Off “Broken Mess” Obamacare Subsidies
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Oct 13, 2017
As we detailed earlier, it was an early morning for a seemingly excited, insomniac Donald Trump, who shortly before 6am tweeted on the topic of the night, namely the late Thursday elimination of subsidies to health insurers, which took place just hours after the president signed an executive order to designed to draw people away from Obamacare coverage markets.
“The Democrats ObamaCare is imploding. Massive subsidy payments to their pet insurance companies has stopped. Dems should call me to fix!”
As reported last night, late on Thursday, the Trump administration said it would immediately stop paying what are known as cost-sharing reduction, or CSR, subsidies. The payments, which have been a subject of legal dispute during the Obama administration, go to health insurers in the Affordable Care Act to help lower-income people with co-pays and other cost sharing. Without them, insurers have said they’ll dramatically raise premiums or pull out of the law’s state-based markets, as Bloomberg reports.
Ahead of the White House announcement, and given the disagreements over the payments including ongoing lawsuit questioning their legality, many health insurers had dramatically raised the premiums they planned to charge for next year in anticipation of not getting the funds. The payments are made monthly, and have been estimated at $7 billion in total this year. “Many, but not all, insurers assumed these payments would end and set 2018 premiums accordingly,” Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said by email. “Those that didn’t build this into their premiums may petition to adjust their rates or threaten to pull out of the marketplace. It seems like we’re in for a chaotic run up to the beginning of open enrollment.”
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